February 20, 2016

Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders spent $34.9m in Jan., leaving his campaign with $14.7m at month's end. Donors to him during month included musicians Norah Jones and Jackson Browne; actors Susan Sarandon, Joaquin Phoenix, Zach Galifianakis NOTE: Sarandon has campaigned with Sanders NOTE: Hillary Clinton raised less than Sanders in Jan. but ended month with $32.9m, more than double his cash-on-hand About $13.3m of Sanders' Jan. donations, or 63%, came from those giving less than $200 Among don

Cues, such as boredom, hunger, an activity, a time, or an emotion trigger us to do certain actions or routines. When we complete that routine, we get a physical or an emotional reward. Doing this often enough gets us into a habit forming loop. Read More

Hillary Clinton was projected to pull out a narrow victory over Bernie Sanders in Nevada's Democratic caucuses that will help right her campaign but also illustrated her vulnerabilities in the nomination race.

Hillary Clinton was projected the winner of the Nevada Democratic Saturday. Fox News and NBC called the race in favor of Clinton at about 2:15 P.M. local time. Clinton was capturing 52 percent of the vote with 62 percent of precincts reporting Saturday afternoon. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) followed behind with 48 percent of the vote among Democratic caucusgoers.

FOVE, an eye-tracking VR headset company, announced today that due to unexpected difficulties in part-sourcing it will be delaying the expected ship date of its Kickstarter-backed HMD to fall 2016. Likely to be more upsetting to many of the developer backers, the HMD is losing support for HTC's Lighthouse system and instead will be utilizing its own positional tracking system. The… Read More

(John Hinderaker) No, I am not talking about the Rutgers and Brown cellar-dwelling basketball teams. I'm referring to their student bodies. Earlier today, Scott noted the physical and mental breakdowns that reportedly are endemic among Brown's social justice warriors. These people seemingly wouldn't be able to run a Girl Scout cookie stand without psychiatric help. But still, they might not be as pathetic as the Rutgers students who were traumatized by the

This week the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) successfully launched a new space observatory designed to study black holes, dying stars and the history of galaxy clusters. The X-ray Astronomy Satellite, known as ASTRO-H, will be able to detect X-rays more than 10 times fainter than its telescope predecessor, Suzaku. ASTRO-H was launched on the Japanese launch vehicle H-IIA from… Read More

In this corner: A number of employers, particularly tech companies, who claim they have a large number of unfilled positions and can't find enough skilled American workers to fill all their needs, and thus need to attract skilled foreign workers through an expanded H-1B visa program. In the opposite corner: Immigration skeptics, including probably every unemployed programmer in the… Read More

(Paul Mirengoff) As we enter this weekend's action, college basketball looks as wide open as I can recall it being. The top ten-10, and even the top-five, is populated mainly by teams with at least four losses. No team looks ready to dominate. Earlier this week, number 3 Oklahoma lost at Texas Tech; number 4 Iowa lost at Penn State; and number 5 North Carolina lost at home to Duke. That was

EquiPay, a bill-splitting app that accounts for racial and gender income inequalities, is on its way to becoming a reality, after starting as a joke at Cultivated Wit's Comedy Hack Day. With EquiPay, the idea is "reparations, one meal at a time," so instead of splitting meals equally among friends, it's about splitting them equitably. In March, the plan is to make… Read More

Thousands of mourners gathered for the funeral of Antonin Scalia, the U.S. Supreme Court justice whose conservative views and outspoken nature made him one of the country's most recognizable and controversial legal figures.

We hear it again and again: The U.S. K-12 education system is in crisis. In its 2015 report, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, otherwise known as "The Nation's Report Card," revealed that just one-third of eighth graders and one-quarter of twelfth graders performed at or above "proficient" in math. In reading comprehension, the performance was… Read More

(Scott Johnson) Natan Sharansky is one of the great men of our time. Charged with fabricated crimes as a citizen of the Soviet Union, he suffered for years in the gulag until his eventual release and emigration to Israel. He tells the story in his moving memoir Fear No Evil. He has turned his experience to good use in thinking through issues of human rights, as in The Case for Democracy (with

For Sen. Bernard Sanders, a win in Saturday's Nevada caucuses would offer an opportunity to not only seize momentum and boost fundraising in the Democratic presidential primary, but also to put another sizable dent in Hillary Clinton's narrative of inevitability.

Apple will lose this battle with the US government. Maybe not this year, or next, but soon enough, and for the rest of our lives. It is folly to pretend otherwise. Most ordinary people, and most powerful people, don't care about abstruse theoretical arguments against back doors and weakened security. They care about—or want to exploit—the raw visceral fear of terrorist violence. Read More